Learn from Clinton: Biden needs to pivot on immigration

December was a really bad month for Joe Biden on immigration. The 300,000 estimated southern border crossings and attempted crossings set an all-time record for a single month. His approval rating on the issue of immigration dropped by 8 points, putting him at 38 percent to Donald Trump’s 60 percent on an issue that voters rank as most important after prices and inflation.

Meanwhile, big city Democratic mayors begged the White House for financial help in dealing with the crush of arriving immigrants, such as the ones camped in the Boston Airport because the city’s shelters were full.

Biden has a hard choice. He can make a deal with Republicans to get aid for Ukraine and Israel in exchange for toughened border security, or he can face a government shutdown, plus disasters at the border, in Ukraine, and at the polls in November. 

Given this calamity quadfecta, a deal with Republicans is the lesser of two evils. But it will be ugly, the only question being how ugly.

Right-wing House Republicans, who are trying to tie federal government funding to a border deal, won’t be satisfied until they make the Statute of Liberty weep. To get Ukraine and Israel funding, and avoid a shutdown, Biden may have to sign on to higher bars for asylum seekers, harsher deportation policies, and even building sections of the border wall.

Such a deal will break a core Biden 2020 campaign promise of a safe, welcoming, and humane immigration system. During a 2019 presidential primary debate, Biden urged asylum applicants to “surge” to the border.  “We’re a nation that says, ‘You want to flee, and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come.'”

Biden could learn from another president who, in an election year, signed on to historic legislation to fix a dysfunctional system, even though it contained provisions that he and his party regarded as harsh, if not cruel. That president did it without looking weak and hypocritical, and he won re-election. He did it by being flexible.

I am talking about Bill Clinton, the lemons-into-lemonade master. He signed the 1996 welfare reform bill, called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, passed by a Republican-dominated Congress. 

The legislation, among other things, allowed states to deprive legal immigrants of benefits and impose work requirements on low-income mothers without funding an increase in day care options. Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna E. Shalala, fought it in the Cabinet, several of Clinton’s senior welfare policy aides resigned in protest, and the influential Sen. Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) predicted that “we will have children sleeping on grates.”

But the politically elastic Clinton, acknowledging the law’s “serious flaws,” took credit nonetheless for “transforming a broken system.” A senior House Republican said that Clinton’s feat reminded him of the adage, “When you’re being run out of town, jump up front and act like it’s a parade.” 

Can Joe Biden do a similar political pirouette? 

An episode last July, when Biden announced the completion of gaps in a Trump-built wall near Yuma, Arizona, is not encouraging. He was legally compelled to spend money that Congress had appropriated for wall construction, but when asked if he thought a border barrier works, he rigidly replied, “No.” And so Biden managed to break a campaign pledge not to complete “another foot” of Trump’s wall while depriving himself of any credit for improving border security. 

He didn’t have to be so inflexible. When Biden was vice president, the Obama administration built more miles of new barrier (as opposed to replacement wall) than Donald Trump. The 2023 budget for Biden’s Department of Homeland Security states that a border wall “impedes and denies illicit cross-border activity by allowing law enforcement an increased response time.”

Biden has no alternative but to be flexible if he wants to save Ukraine, reduce the chaos at the border, keep the government open and, like Clinton, win a second term.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. His book, Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, was just published by St. Martin’s Press. Follow on @GregoryWallance.